Facebook Apps - Sriram Kumar - Bangalore PHP Meet April 2010

8/9/2019 Facebook Apps - Sriram Kumar - Bangalore PHP Meet April 2010

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Facebook ApplicationsSriram Kumar

Freelance Web Developer



History of Facebook

Facebook was founded by four people MarkZuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and

Chris Hughes. Mark Zuckerberg developed Facemash on October

28, 2003.

Facemash is a version of Hot or Not of Harvard.

Facemash generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photoviews in its first four hours online.

Facemash later turned into Facebook with someadded features.



Terms Used

If you are planning to develop applications for

Facebook obviously you need to learn Facebook

terminology. Here are some words frequently used in

Facebook:

Wall

Profile

News Feed

Poke

Canvas



Advantages of Having a Facebook

Application

Drive Web Traffic

Reputation Management Good Possibility of New Customer Acquisition

The Viral Effect Word of Mouth



Drawbacks of Facebook Apps

Less Chances For SEO

Limited API Calls Lots of Depricated Functions

Many Rules.



Sample Facebook Apps

There are two types of Facebook Applications.

Product Dependent Applications and

Product Independent Applications




Product Dependent Apps

These are nothing but a bridge created beetween Facebook

and the users with an already existing product.

This is only done to expand the market of that product.

The best example is Zoho on Facebook.

Zoho is a business solution provider. With zoho we can store

and read office docs online, chat with zoho users, have a

planner and many more. Zoho has developed a Facebook app where zoho users can

login to the app and read their stored word, excel, pdf

documents etc.





Zoho can be accessed at: http://apps.facebook.com/zohoapp








Product Independent Apps

The product independent applications are becoming more

and more popular on Facebook.

These are the applications that are created only for Facebook.They dont have a market outside Facebook.

Examples are Zynga Games, Magic Fortune Cookie, Anita

Predictions, BillMonk, Facebook Quiz etc.

90% of the Facebook applications come under the productindependent category.




Product Independent Apps

The product independent applications are becoming more

and more popular on Facebook.

These are the applications that are created only for Facebook.They dont have a market outside Facebook.

Examples are Zynga Games, Magic Fortune Cookie, Anita

Predictions, BillMonk, Facebook Quiz etc.

90% of the Facebook applications come under the productindependent category.



API

Facebook API is a web services programming interface for

accessing core Facebook services.

It is based on a REST(Representational State Transfer) basedarchitecture.

Facebook officially supports PHP and Java.

Unofficial client libraries available for ASP.NET, C#, C++, Perl,

Python, Ruby on Rails, VB.NET and Windows Mobile.



API

Some API Methods:

users.getInfo : Fetch User specific info.

photos.addTag : Adds a tag to a photo.

pages.isFan : Checks whether a specified user is a fan of a

page.

feed.publishStoryToUser : Publishes a News Feed story to

the current user.

data.getCookies

data.setCookies



FBML

FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language.

It contains a subset of HTML elements.

FBML also contains several extensions for Facebook UI

elements.

For example, the element fb:name displays the name of the

user based on the UID attribute.



FBML

Consider the following FBML syntax:

<p>Hello: <fb:name uid=974127077 useyou=false/></p>

If the name of the user with the user Id 974127077 is Ram Kumar theoutput will be Hello: Ram Kumar.

If we change the attribute useyou =true then the output will be Hello:

you if the script is executed from the login of Ram Kumar; for other users

the output will be Hello: Ram Kumar.



FQL

FQL is Faecbook Query Language.

With FQL we can access Facebook database tables such as user, friend,group, phot, album etc.

FQL is similar to standard SQL but with a few restrictions. SELECT statements must be performed on one table at a time.

Join queries are not permitted.

We can perfrom most of the data access in Facebook with API as well asFQL.

If you need to access the list of friends of a particular user, you can useeither an API call or a FQL statement.

API calls are nothing but wrappers for FQL querite.

FQL helps to reduce the bandwidth, parsing overhead and can minimizethe number of data requests in complex situations.



Configuration

Pre Requisites:

Domain Name

WebHosting

A Sub domain

Facebook API uploaded in the Server

A Facebook Account.

Facebook Client Library



Configuration

Create a Facebook account.

Create a sub domain in your web server for the domain name hosted.

Here, I am giving it as ram.webfolks.in

Login to Facebook and then go to facebook.com/developers

Click on Setup New Application.



Configuration



Configuration



Configuration



Configuration



Configuration



Configuration



Configuration



References

References:

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/

Wikipedia.com

Facebook Application Development by Nick Gerakines



Thank You

Sriram Kumar

[email protected]

Documents

Facebook Apps - Sriram Kumar - Bangalore PHP Meet April 2010